DRAGON QUEST I & II ARTICLES

June 18, 2009 - Final Fantasy is the longest swan song of all time. It was never meant to last, but now, more than two decades later, it remains the most recognizable name in role-playing games. More of an idea than a true series, it has evolved into something that a young Hironobu Sakaguchi would never recognize and almost single-handedly turned a small, struggling company into an international powerhouse. In the twenty years since it first arrived on Japanese Famicom systems, it's never once relied on nostalgia or conceded to rest on its laurels. Every new game has continued to press forward, and that's precisely what makes it one of the most interesting stories in game history.

January 26, 2009 - Us Europeans have always complained that we get the short end of the stick when it comes to getting games last, and understandably so - Square Enix is due to release Chrono Trigger in the UK next month, a whole 14 years after the game first came out in Japan and the US!

July 19, 2005 - The RPG label has become so vague and all encompassing that it no longer accurately describes anything. Think about what those three letters mean. Role-playing game. That term effectively explains just about every recent videogame on the market. Aren't you role-playing when you become a mercenary in a first-person shooter or catch a football in the latest Madden sequel? Go ahead. Take a minute and try to explain to your girlfriend why Game A is an RPG while Game B isn't and you'll likely be greeted by a dull, blank stare. And yet, for those of us who grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons or spent the better half of our afternoons exploring a world in Final Fantasy, there's a clear separation between a true RPG and every other genre. That's great. But how do you define it?